Book excerpt: This advanced graduate-level text examines variational methods in partial differential equations and illustrates their applications to a number of free-boundary problems. Detailed statements of the standard theory of elliptic and parabolic operators make this treatment readable for engineers, students, and nonspecialists alike. The text's first two chapters can be used for a single-semester graduate course in variational inequalities or partial differential equations. The succeeding chapters -- covering jets and cavities, variational problems with potentials, and free-boundary problems not in variational form -- are more specialized and self-contained. Readers who have mastered chapters 1 and 2 will be able to conduct research on the problems explored in subsequent chapters. Bibliographic remarks conclude each chapter, along with several problems and exercises.